Monday, March 20, 2006

Equinotical Beakful of Knowledge

The vernal equinox occurred at 6:26 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time today, marking the official start of Spring. Astronomically, the equinoxes are when the sun crosses the plane created by extending Earth's equator out into space. The two equinoxes are also the points when the Earth's rotational axis, which is tilted with respect to the plane of Earth's orbit, is perpendicular to the sun, pointing neither toward the sun nor away from it. The practical upshot of that here on the surface of the Earth is that day and night are equal in length. From now until the summer solstice, days will get longer, and until the autumnal equinox in September, there will be more light than dark, at least in the Northern hemisphere. While the equinoxes are often thought of as being days, actually they are only a moment.

Nothing about the vernal equinox makes it any more amenable to standing an egg on end than any other day of the year.

The word "equinox" gets you 23 points in Scrabble.

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